Jed,
I think for the foreseeable future robots will wear out and the industry
will be more like the car industry where you have to buy a new one every
so many years and it will then have more advanced features. Advanced
robots will not be cheap.
Likewise, the government will still be needed for some things like
defense and law enforcement, so the manufacturers will be taxed. UBI
will be required to allow the robot makers/owners make some money and
have some incentive to keep going.
Entertainment will obviously grow with the need and that has to be paid
for, so again the need for UBI.
Maybe in the very, very distant future, with the singularity and repair
robots, the game will change, but that is too far off to speculate about.
On 11/25/2016 11:27 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
H LV <hveeder...@gmail.com <mailto:hveeder...@gmail.com>> wrote:
​Universal basic income isn't a neo-communist proposal.
It was first proposed by conservative economists Friederich Hayek and
Milton Friedman. There is a lot of conservative support for it. See:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/
<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/>
As far as I know Karl Marx never called for a basic income, and
today most trade unions oppose it.
It would never work in the 19th century. You need an robot-based
economy where Watson-class computers are ubiquitous, so human labor
has no value. We are not there yet, but we will be in a generation or
two. We need to phase in something like a basic income.
Perhaps I am the proverbial man who has only a hammer and sees all
problems as a nail, but I think technology changes everything. A
proposal such basic income would be impossible in 19th century. It
would be immoral in the 20th century, because we would have to exploit
people to make it work. It would also be destructive, because it would
reduce incentives to work, and we needed people to do many jobs that
paid poorly or were disagreeable. But, as robots increase, there will
be fewer and fewer jobs like that. If many people become lazy and
spend their lives doing frivolous things that pay little, or don't pay
at all, it will not hurt society. We will not need their labor
anymore. We will have no use for it. So we might as well let the
robots support them. It will not take money out of my pocket of a
machine works for you and gives you everything you need.
Here is a purely imaginary example which is quite different from how
the economy is likely to work, but it illustrates my point. Imagine in
2050 someone buys an all-purpose robot and some tool attachments. The
person goes off to rural area with a 10 acres of land. The robot
builds a house using mainly local materials. It builds and runs a
small automated greenhouse/food factory. With a food factory that's
more than enough to grow all the food you need. They have cold fusion
power supplies. They have a 3D fabrication machine. In other words,
the robot supplies the person with nearly all of the necessities of
life at zero cost. The person is autonomous.
Some people have said that in the future, whoever owns all the robots
will monopolize power and income. But suppose everyone has a robot?
After the robot is paid for, why would anyone pay pay corporations to
manufacture things with robots when he has his own robot and a 3D
gadget to make most things? Robots will be cheap because there will be
competition.
The isolated person in a rural area is not how it would actually work.
Most people will probably live in suburban or urban areas. But the
principle is the same. If people have a guaranteed basic income and
access to robots, autonomy will likely increase, and large
corporations are likely to lose political and economic power.
Also bear in mind that patents run out and technology gets cheaper
over time. In the 19th century, railroads monopolized transportation
and exploited farmers who needed to ship goods to markets. With
automobiles, the railroads lost their monopoly, and faded in
importance. In the 20th century, AT&T was given a telephone monopoly,
because the technology did not allow multiple phone companies in the
same community. Microsoft developed a "natural monopoly" because
computers only work well when they are exactly alike, and there can
only be two or three standards (PC and Mac). Facebook presently has a
near-monopoly on social media, and Amazon on retail sales. These
monopolies are caused by technology, and as technology changes or
enters the public domain they tend to gradually fade away. Ownership
of robots and Watson-class computers may be concentrated at first, but
eventually we will all have Watson computers costing a few hundred
dollars each. IBM is developing an MPP computer on a chip with 50,000
processors.
- Jed
